dirkt

Let me supply an /s tag, just in case.

Yes, I lately feel like the internet is lately mostly acting like a mob, and finger pointing "look, how stupid they are!" is the main content.

What happened to VERIFYING an answer? Does nobody do that anymore?

When I ask an LLM, I trace the sources, and see if they make sense.

More often than not the sources don't actually say anything about the topic in particular...

It’s also scary how easily you can lead each LLM to the answer you have in mind.

Exactly. Which is why "treat an LLM like a human expert who can answer your question" doesn't work. It's more like a human bullshitter who makes up convincing looking answers, and tries to please you. If the answers have actually some grounding in the training material, that's useful as some kind of holistic google, but often it's not.

Does this stuff make sense to other people?

Nope, and I actually learned about application of category theory to programming language in university.

I tried to get an idea about the main points, and then stumbled over

a thing is what you can observe of it. > [...] > Content addressing is extensionality made physical (chapter 11): two values indistinguishable by observation are not merely equal, they are the same slot

That only works in a category because you have enough (a countably or uncountably infinite number) functions that you can compose and "test" so you don't need (or don't care) about the "value" itself.

But on a real computer that doesn't work, because you can't go beyond a countable number, and even then you run into the halting problem pretty soon. So equality in this model is not computable. Which is sort of bad if you want to somehow store values "in the same slot" just based on observability. It might work for string literals, and even for concatenated strings, but not in general.

Picking some random lattice (a lattice is a partially ordered structure with some extra conditions) as a base of addressing doesn't help...

So yes, crackpot AI slop. The words sort of make sense, but there's nothing solid behind it, and as soon as you look at details it falls apart.

works really well in Rust and TypeScript too

And of course Rust and TypeScript were heavily influenced by Haskell... they just don't mention it and call things differently, to avoid the "monads are scary, I need to write a tutorial" effect. Though it's less about monads and more about things like type classes.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

The point is that algebraic data types are common in functional languages. "Maybe" is just an example of an algebraic data type, there's tons more.

If the article says "functional programmers should take a look at Zig", and Zig makes algebraic data types hard, then maybe they shouldn't use it.

If you even say "the annoyingness is a feature, use zig the way it is intended to be used" then that's another signal for functional programmers that they won't be able to use zig the same way they use functional languages.

you ask the LLM what's wrong, you learn something new about the syntax

So if you have no LLM to ask, can you figure out on your own what is wrong? Just by reading documentation?

That's also an important skill to have.

I dont think that helps that much.

Teletext [1] was extremely popular in Europe before the Internet was widely available for private households. Also piggybacked on TV.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext

If you run nginx anyway, why not serve static files from nginx? No need for temporary files, no extra disk space.

The authorization can probably be done somehow in nginx as well.

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260329164132/https://techfixat...

They offered a bug bounty, so people think "let me just use ChatGPT to make money for myself".

But from I hear it affects other projects too. It affected curl more because with the bug bounty they actually need to invest work and look at those.

[1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-f...

[2] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s...

Eliza's granddaughter.

Isn't "you can waste energy and heat up our planet and make live for everybody else harder just to make money for a few" enough?

I still find it very curious that after Russia invaded Ukraine, now Trump is using rhetoric that makes it look like the US is ready to invade some other country, too, they just have not decided on the victim yet.

And of course "start a war with another country" is an excellent example of how to control your country in case you have to, because, say, elections are coming up and you may loose.

I am old enough to have lived in Germany when they were not coin operated, and most carts were returned at that time as well.

Though occasionally you saw a cart far far away from a supermarket, where someone had basically stolen it, either teenagers to have fun, or someone asocial who, I don't know, used to carry all the shopping home? I don't really know what they did with it.

And it was the cost of replacing those stolen carts that drove the adaption of the coin operation system. Not that people just left them in the parking lot. Some supermarkets also tried a system where the cart locked if you moved it out of range of some radio in the supermarket, but that one really didn't take off.

(Also, quite a few people in Germany just do shopping by walking or biking to the supermarket).

I actually migrated from Homebrew to Macports after ending up in dependency hell in Homebrew with Postgresql + Postgis, and not being able to fix this properly even with my own brew recipes.

So for now that works a lot better in Macports. The portfile stuff needed some digging to understand, but that's doable.

Not sure what made you move from Macports to Homebrew. (Should I worry?)

Most of the world is powered by Unix

Well, Unix came into being on a DEC PDP-11, and C is basically high-level PDP-11 assembly...

And MS-DOS was influenced by CP/M which was influenced by DEC operating systems (like OS/8 for the PDP-8).

You can play Empire on cyber1 [1], an emulated PLATO system.

[1] https://www.cyber1.org

Unlike the IBN 5100 [1] (which I guess actually was IBM's First Laptop Computer), the 5140 ran MS-DOS, and couldn't emulate the IBM/360 ISA like the IBN 5100 could, so it would be useless for John Titor because you couldn't hack SERN with it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100

Try exporting things from Excel to CSV on a Mac with non-us locale.

Some genius at Microsoft decided the exporting to CSV should follow the locale convention. Which means I get a "semicolon-separated value" file instead of a comma-separated one, unless I change my local to us.

Line breaks are also fun...

You almost always know how the formers’ work will be broken.

The thing is that there are enough people who blindly trust ChatGPT's answers, and they don't know in which ways they could be broken, and they wouldn't have the knowledge to verify the answers because they are asking about things they themselves know very little about.

But that doesn't need new peripherals, I could do that in my home WLAN network if they'd just install standard software for it on the phone (which you can fix by installing it from F-Droid etc.)

I am always disappointed they didn't go all the way and made async/await syntactic sugar for a general Monad abstraction, like in Haskell.

And I like the Haskell do-blocks.

https://github.com/f8-arch

You can decompress the streams with mutool and edit the Postscript-like code in any editor, if you want. (That doesn't help a lot with editing text, of course...)

Same with programming: You just copy some old code and modify it, if you have something lying around.

Same with frameworks (Angular, Spring Boot, ...). The tools even come with templates to generate new boilerplate for people who don't have existing ones somewhere.

Don't forget that other manufacturers collect the same data, they just didn't have a collection of blunders that allowed access. No malicious intent this time, but it clearly highlights that companies need to learn to put policies in place to make double sure PII is actually protected to the degree the law already requires. We also need laws that force companies to make opting out of this kind of data collection much easier, or to make it opt-in in the first place.

Usually all the CCC talks get subtitled, give the hard working teams a few days, there's many talks...

Completed videos are here: https://media.ccc.de/c/38c3

But Facebook collects your interactions, adds them to your (shadow) profile, and sells this marketing data to advertisers.

I have used them for OpenAPI specs shared between frontend and backend, and database schemas together with values for a test database in the pipeline.

Yes, you can also solve this with a monorepo...